Let's stop pretending that the US is a functioning democracy.

Article of Chris Hedges originally published on your SubstacksTranslated and adapted by Rubens Turkienicz exclusively for Brasil 247.

There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom, while simultaneously enacting socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.

The result of decades of actions, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The continuous dispossession of economic and political power was ignored by a hyper-ventilating press that railed against the barbarians at the gate – Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, ISIS, Vladimir Putin – while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts, or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains.

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, in his book 'Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted TotalitarianismHe calls our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The façade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols, and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to portray itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights, and civil liberties, even though half the country struggles to survive at a subsistence level, militarized police shoot and imprison the poor with impunity, and the state’s primary business is war.

This collective illusion masks who we have become – a nation in which citizenship has been stripped of economic and political power, and where the brutal militarism we practice abroad is practiced here.

In classic totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union, the economy was subordinated to politics. However, under inverted totalitarianism, the reverse is true. There are no attempts, unlike in fascism or state socialism, to meet the needs of the poor. Instead, the poorer and more vulnerable you are, the more exploited you are pushed into a situation from which there is no escape. Social services – from education to healthcare – are anemic, non-existent, or privatized to deceive the impoverished. Furthermore... devastated Due to an inflation rate of 8,5%, wages were... sharply devalued since 1979. The jobs, very often, offer no other benefits or job security.

You can watch an interview I did with Sheldon in 2014. here.

in my book 'America: The Farewell Tour'I examined the social indicators of a nation with serious problems. Life expectancy in the US declined in 2011 for the second year in a row. There were more than 300 mass shootings this year. About one million people have died from drug overdoses since 1999. An average of 132 suicides every dayApproximately 42% of the country's population is classified as obese, with one in 11 adults considered severely obese.

These illnesses of despair are rooted in the disconnect between society's expectations for a better future and the reality of a system that does not provide a meaningful place for its citizens. The loss of a sustainable income and social stagnation cause more than just financial distress. As Émile Durkheim points out in his book 'The Division of Labor in SocietyThis breaks the social bonds that make us meaningful. A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of adequate education and healthcare, and a loss of hope result in crippling forms of humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger, and feelings of worthlessness.

In his book 'Hitler and the Germans', the political philosopher Eric Voegelin This discredits the idea that Hitler – talented in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar – mesmerized and seduced the German people. He writes that the Germans supported Hitler and the “grotesque and marginal” figures who surrounded him because he embodied the pathologies of a sick society, beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means that a “stupid” person cannot “correctly orient their actions in the world in which they live.” The demagogue, who is always a moronIt is not an aberration or a social mutation. The demagogue expresses the zeitgeist of society.

The acceleration of deindustrialization in the 1970s, as I write in my book 'America, The Farewell Tour', created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to invent a new political paradigm – as Stuart Hall explains in his book 'Policing the Crisis'Trumpeted by complacent media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime, and law and order. This showed those undergoing profound economic and political change that their suffering does not stem from rampant militarism and corporate greed, but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that supported the New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as empowering black criminal youth, "welfare queens," and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to populism.' falseThe Democratic Party, initiated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, Christian faith, and a return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans – saw the Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton, move steadily to the right until it became largely indistinguishable from the Republican Party establishment to which it is now allied. The result was Donald Trump and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020.

It will be of no use – as it did Biden Last Thursday in Philadelphia – to demonize Trump and his supporters in the same way they demonize Biden and the Democrats. Brandishing clenched fists, illuminated by ominous red lights and flanked by two US Marines in dress uniform, Biden announced from his grotesque stage that “Donald Trump and the MAGA ('Make America Great Again') Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

Donald Trump called the speech the most "cruel, hateful and divisive speech ever given by a US president" and attacked Biden as "an enemy of the state."

Biden's frontal attack widens the divide. It solidifies a system in which voters don't vote for what they want, since neither side delivers anything substantial, but rather opposes what they despise. Biden doesn't address the socioeconomic crisis, nor does he offer solutions. This was political theater.

Anti-politics masquerades as politics. No sooner does one election cycle, awash with money, end than the next begins, perpetuating what Wollin described. flame of "politics without politics"These elections do not allow citizens to participate in power. They allow the public to voice opinions on scripted questions that are repackaged by advertisers, opinion pollsters, political consultants, and propagandists and fed back to them. Few are the contests for political office, including..." only 14% of congressional districts are considered competitive. Politicians don't campaign on substantive issues, but only on skillfully manufactured political personalities and emotionally charged culture wars.

The militarists – who created a state within a state and who plunge us into one military fiasco after another, consuming half of discretionary spending – are omnipotent. The corporations and billionaires – who orchestrated a virtual tax boycott and eviscerated regulations and oversight – are omnipotent. The industrialists – who wrote the trade agreements to profit from the unemployment and underemployment of American and European workers. precarious workers abroad – are omnipotent. The pharmaceutical and insurance industries – which operate the healthcare system, whose main concern is profit and not health, and which are responsible The intelligence agencies – which carry out mass surveillance of the people – are omnipotent. The courts – which reinterpret laws to strip them of their original meaning in order to ensure corporate control and excuse corporate crimes – are omnipotent. For example, the courts gave us 'Citizens United' which... allow Unlimited corporate funding for elections, claiming that this defends the right to petition the government and is a form of free speech.

Politics is a spectacle, a flamboyant carnival, in which the constant struggle for power by the ruling class dominates news circles, as if politics were a competition to win a national championship. The real business of domination is hidden, run by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, by banks that plunder the Treasury, by the war industry, and by an oligarchy that determines who will be elected and who will not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry, or Raytheon, no matter which party is in government.

The moment any segment of the population, right or left, refuses to participate in this illusion, the face of inverted totalitarianism resembles the face of classical totalitarianism – as Julian Assange what he is experiencing.

Our corporate and militaristic masters prefer the decorum of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But they worked closely with Donald Trump and are willing to do so again. What they will not allow are reformers like Bernie Sanders, who might challenge, even in a lukewarm way, their obscene accumulation of wealth and power. This inability to reform, to restore democratic participation, and to address social inequality means the inevitable death of the republic. Biden and the Democrats are fighting against the cult of the Republican Party and its threat to democracy – but they are also the problem.